Presented by Jeffrey Zeldman.

  • Content is a design problem, and yet our designs are often hostile to it.
  • Get the right content to the right user at the right time. That’s what design is. So say Zeldman.
  • Instapaper begat Readability begat Safari Reader.
  • “Any Shaun Inman fans in here?”
  • The job of the designer is to serve the customer. See: Connect the right user with the right content at the right time.
  • Design that does not serve people does not serve business. As an experienced designer, you will be asked to do stuff that is not in the user’s interest. You will need the tools and the data to fight back.
  • Beware DarkPatterns!
  • The Blogger redesign led by Doug Bowman along with Jeffrey Zeldman, Ethan Marcotte, Dan Cederholm, etc. launched millions of standards-compliant sites.
  • Todd Dominey’s Blogger template, despite being beautifully designed, had too much character and interfered with the content.
  • Doug Bowman banged out Minima in two hours and is being used on upwards of 50 million sites.
  • The late John Slatin’s Leukemia Letters blog.
  • Aaron Gustafson’s Adaptive Web Design
  • Responsive design is not entirely a replacement for a mobile strategy. A responsive strategy depends on the needs of the project at hand.
  • For Zeldman, “mobile first” is really “content first.”
  • What’s good for mobile may be good for all. Think: restaurant websites.
  • If we don’t design with content first, our users will do it for us.